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Getting More Women Coders Into Open Source
Nerval's Lobster writes: Diversity remains an issue in tech firms across the nation, with executives and project managers publicly upset over a lack of women in engineering and programming roles. While all that's happening on the corporate side, a handful of people and groups are trying to get more women involved in the open source community, like Women of OpenStack, Outreachy (which is geared toward people from underrepresented groups in free software), and others. How much effort should be expended to facilitate diversity among programmers? Can anything be done to shift the demographics, considering the issues that even large, coordinated companies have with altering the collective mix of their employees?
Fill all the forums with macho bravado. I hear that works every time.
just stop
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I really wish my company had more female coders, because I'd like to see if they would provide a different perspective. As it is, we only have one, and she is good, but does not work in our sustainment group (instead she works on capital projects only).
Maybe coding is just something that attracts more men than women. I know it's always been that way for me. I've known very few women who take coding up as a profession, and those I have known were always very good (or at least, I've known men who were way worse).
However, it's entirely likely that men and women simply gravitate to different professions. We are not the same, to assume we are is to deny our differences.
We shouldn't mandate a 50/50 split, but we should ensure that there are no barriers to anyone wishing to pursue this profession. Once any barriers are removed (and I'm not sure there are any now), then we would see what the true diversity in backgrounds for coders would be.
You know how more women can be involved into open-source ? When there are more women coding open source. That's it. This is not a f**cking social issue.
If diversity improves the quality of code, then let every open source project or company decide that it is suffering from al lthose nasty bugs and lack of vision because there isn't enough estrogen in the mailing list. It isn't my problem. It isn't society's problem. It's not like women are banned from computer science and coding. And frankly, nobody how cares many women are coding, good for those who are, and good for those who aren't. It's coding...not suffrage or human rights or anything of fundamental importance to society. It's like cribbing about how all the cobblers in my town are men , no women. Well, boo fucking hoo.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
One of the things that draws me to Open Source is that the barriers to entry are absolutely fucking zero. You want to build an Open Source app? Do it. Release it. If people want to use it and contribute to it, they will. If not, they won't (see the billions of abandoned/disused apps on sourceforge, github, etc). Run it however the fuck you want.
However, this really smacks of "Oh, but doesn't feel welcome in the community!" that's been going around lately. So the fuck what? DO IT YOURSELF. Don't wait for my approval. Don't wait to look around to see if anyone cares. If you want to do it, DO IT. You don't like how some maintainer is maintaining a project? FORK IT and make SOMETHING BETTER. Show them how YOU would do it. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP AND START DOING instead of WHINING.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
If things like gender are to genuinely supposed to not influence our reactions in the workplace, then we need to stop fucking focusing on them and accept people, men and women, for who they are, or whatever interests they happen to have that may, or may not, happen to direct them into a particular industry.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I keep trying to convince my teenage daughters that they should get into coding since they are absolutely guaranteed to get a great job after college, even if they are just mediocre developers, purely because of their gender! But no... they would rather study things like journalism and anthropology. My mind boggles. I am a professional coder who also teaches a college level web development course on the side. I have the resources and experience to train them, but my offers fall on deaf ears. Sigh. Even after being married to a woman and having four daughters I just don't get girls.
Most people who get into computers and programming are naturally introverted.
This is a stereotype, and not really true.
On the other hand, it's important to understand that men and woman at NOT the same, and they may have different ideas about what they want to do in life.
The idea that in every field, we must have 50/50 is simply stupid.
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